


The Sacrifices You Choose

by Dreadbeasts



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: All Magic Comes With a Price, Body Horror, Gen, Possession, Transformation, donate to my adopt soren and claudia gofundme, karma's a bitch and so is aaravos, the bad ending for Viren
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 03:24:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21292841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreadbeasts/pseuds/Dreadbeasts
Summary: Viren is no stranger to the ill effects of magic on the human body.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 45





	The Sacrifices You Choose

Viren is no stranger to the ill effects of magic on the human body.

Without his daily restoration rite, he knows that he looks like a dried up husk of a man, a grey streaked lich, dried out and corrupted by the dark magic that affords him his station at the palace. Opeli and her ingrates would never understand that this is the cost of dark magic, the price he pays for their fertile fields and security, but it’s meaningless anyway.

He is chained in a cell, having made a series of choices over the previous few days, culminating in his attacking several guards (the force of his secret ally on display) and subsequent arrest. 

He sighs. Everything has its price. How foolish of him to forget. 

Damn Opeli! Damn the council! Wasn’t he doing everything in his considerable power to defend humanity? True, the assassins on their way to the other four kingdoms of the Pentarchy were his doing, but it was simply to terrify the other kingdoms out of passive indolence and into action before the  _ real _ threat battered their door down in dragonfire and magic.  _ He _ was willing to make those sacrifices - why weren’t they?

Even his children didn’t get it. Soren and Claudia had looked upon him from the other side of the bars with sad horror. Claudia, at least, understood sacrifice and his motivations, even if she seemed upset by the direct action he’d taken on the guards. Soren… well, Soren never was the brightest candle in the lantern, he supposes. Perhaps, given time and sufficient motivation, Claudia could turn his head towards the truth, towards purpose, once more.

Or perhaps he too was an ingrate, rebuffing his sister’s sacrifice for his health. Typical - and so very like his mother.

Viren sneers and sits back. No sense thinking of  _ her _ in here, though he has little else to do but think. She’d made her choices, and he’d made his. Life is full of consequences, and that was one such example. 

“You seem rather pensive,” a silken baritone purrs in his ear. 

“And here I was thinking you’d abandoned me,” Viren replies, dourly. “You have some nerve, showing yourself after vanishing when I needed you most.”

Aaravos chuckles. “All things in due time, Viren. Consider - once your plans come to fruition, they’ll all feel like  _ awful _ fools. ‘We were wrong to doubt him,’ they might say, as they free you. And then they’ll be twice as unlikely to doubt you again.”

Viren considers what the Startouch elf has said. He’s right, of course. By making Viren seem frantic, even willing to attack others, in defense of what will seem to be the truth that no one else believed, he’ll be lauded as a hero, willing to make the ultimate sacrifices, in the name of king, country, and humankind. It’s genius. And it  _ reeks _ .

“Why are you helping me?” ponders the dark mage, turning towards the ear that the worm is hidden within. True, there’s no one there, but the semblance of turning to someone makes it feel less like he’s talking to himself.

“I’m quite the fan of humans,” says the elf, though it isn’t satisfactory enough for Viren. “Always striving, always reaching, hungry for more and more. That sort of ambition is rare among elves, so I like to encourage it. Interesting things happen when humans ignore their limits.”

It’s such a superior, condescending answer, but Viren isn’t surprised. Aaravos is, after all, an elf, a Startouch elf at that. Info on his type of elf is rare, but what little Viren has read of the Startouch race is that they’re impossibly alien and rather superior, even to elves. The stars, too, are rather enigmatic and powerful, so he isn’t surprised that Aaravos sees himself as some kind of benevolent trickster god. 

Viren’s mistake, though, is in thinking he can outsmart him. “Seriously? I find it hard to believe that your motives are so altruistic, or that you’re so bored you dabble in the fates of the human kingdoms for fun.”

“Well,” replies Aaravos, the smile in his voice apparent, “While it  _ is _ fun, I do hope that we can work together towards common goals.”

“Common goals?”

“Yes. You seek power, don’t you? And I seek my freedom. I can give you power, in spades, enough to crush your rivals and seize not just the crown of Katolis, but from elves and dragons too.”

_ THAT _ gets Viren’s attention. “And I imagine, in return, you want me to find a way to free you from the mirror?”

Aaravos says nothing, but Viren doesn’t need him to. That’s the exchange, the price of power. He gets the crown, Aaravos gets released from limbo.  And Aaravos  _ does _ seem like a rather powerful ally. 

“Then we have a deal,” says Viren, resolute. 

“Oh,  _ wonderful.”  _ The master mage is all but purring. “Of course, I will require a… downpayment, as it were. Insurance, to make sure my help does not go unrewarded.”

Viren nods. Everything has its price, and something to hold as credit makes sense. “What is it?”

“Your eye.”

Viren blinks. “My eye?”

Aaravos hums. “Not the physical eye itself, more… use of your eye. It will remain in your head, we needn’t bother with anything messy. I simply need it to see what goes on around us, to better aid you.”

It bothers Viren, of course. It’s  _ his _ eye, how dare the elf presume so much! But Aaravos does have a point, too. A magical worm perched on his ear at all times would draw suspicion, but an eye - even one that looks a bit… off… will be much harder to detect. 

He sighs. “Very well.”

The vision in his right eye goes black. 

A few days pass in jail, and Aaravos and Viren keep each other company with small talk and mild planning. The elf doesn’t seem keen on planning too far ahead, not until he has the full lay of the land, but it’s evident that he’s spent a very long time isolated and alone, and is eager for conversation. Viren is glad to provide - Aaravos is so knowledgeable and clever, conversing with him is one of the most intellectually stimulating things Viren’s done in a while. 

He ignores the itch in his inner ear where the worm nests, or the black hole in his field of vision to the right. Sacrifices are what win the war.

He is freed on the third day, by a distressed Soren. His son explains that the king of Neolandia is dead, that Opeli has requested they free him, that the King has run away. That Katolis is on the brink of war, and everyone is sorry they doubted him, and now his leadership and magic are needed. 

Just as Aaravos predicted. 

He later catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His blind eye has clouded over with faint white lines, like the cracked surface of glass, his iris not his own but the silver-purple color of Aaravos’s eye. Unbidden by him, his right eye winks. 

With the boy king abdicating the throne, Opeli grants Viren his fondest wish. He is to be crowned king of Katolis.

But the second the crown is placed on his head, searing pain erupts from his eye and face. The crown  _ burns _ like fire. Runes erupt from the band of uneven towers, and Viren screams in agony. 

As the terrified townsfolk watch, their new king’s face drains of color, his skin appearing mottled and grey, the whites of his eyes turning black. The golden glowing runs spin around him, and he screams and screams, tormented by the magic protecting the crown.

He is not the rightful king, the crown was enchanted to protect the kingdom from usurpers eons ago. But that doesn’t matter to the passenger in Viren’s head. He had hoped to wait for this, but the opportunity is here now, and… carpe diem, no? Through Viren, Aaravos seizes one of the glowing runes and twists it sideways, connecting himself to the magic of the crown and to Viren. Through Viren’s eye, and through the worm cocooning in his skull, the Startouch elf pushes slightly against the fabric of magic. His way out has arrived. 

In the Valley of Graves, Viren’s screaming stops abruptly, strangled out of his throat. Opeli and the attendants step back, watching in confused horror as Viren goes limp, sagging backwards on his knees. Then, like a broken marionette, his right arm lurches upwards and twists, the joints cracking sickeningly. His little finger withers like a rotting fruit and falls off, and his arm drops to his side for the left arm to be twisted and mangled in the same manner. 

His children watch in terror as their father then flops bonelessly forward, his brown hair bleaching to pure white in seconds and his beard sloughing off in clumps. Viren, struggling to get the words out or even move on his own, looks up at the horrified faces of Soren and Claudia. They gasp in shock as, before their eyes, their father’s face is being slowly rearranged into that of a stranger. “Soren… Claudia… help--” he pleads, before another strangled scream cuts him off as the pain begins anew. 

He howls in agony as his skull splits open on each side, and two massive pronged horns sprout from the top of his head, his now-white hair lengthening. His skin darkens, seeping to hues of midnight, and from beneath the mop of white beneath the crown, the points of two elongated ears emerge.

“Seize the imposter!” bellows Soren to the guards, drawing his own sword. Whoever they just crowned, it clearly isn’t’ their actual father. His father would never allow himself to be possessed and transfigured into an elf. 

Claudia is smarter, and knows her father figured out the magic mirror. She wouldn’t put it past such a powerful mage not even the Dragon King trusted to pull something like this on their power-hungry father. But she’ll stop him and rescue her dad if she can, so she pulls out the carcass of a spider, ready to launch a bolt of dark fire.

But the elf in their father’s clothing raises a four-fingered hand flecked in starlight and freezes them all in place effortlessly. The golden runes cease spinning, and sink back into the crown, subdued. Robed in coronation white and the crown seated upon his head, the elven king of Katolis stands and regards the petrified crowd below him… and smiles. 

“I am Aaravos,” he says, rich baritone echoing off the valley walls. “And I am finally free.”

Trapped in the back of his own mind, in a library that looks oddly familiar, Viren pounds on the glass of the mirror, screaming and screaming. But the mirror only shows him his reflection and nothing more.

**Author's Note:**

> Big oof for Viren!
> 
> I'd been kicking this one around for a while - transformation and body horror fascinate me, and I did several takes of this before today. And then i saw the trailer for S3 and went "welp, looks like I got my angle!"
> 
> I could honestly write a whole series of 'x character turns into the wrong species and its gross and horrible' style body horror (i've written like 70% of it happening to Callum), so if this is your sick jam let me know in the comments because I'll totally write more :Vb


End file.
